Horse Betting Tips – A Newbies Guide to Online Betting

Power Grid Board Game Review

In Power Grid, a new power market has opened up and everything is up for grabs. Compete against other power suppliers as you work your way towards becoming the biggest power supplier in the land. Build power plants and control the market for raw materials such as garbage, oil, coal and uranium. Connect cities to your power grid before others do and become the greatest power magnate!Power Grid is a strategy board game designed by Friedemann Friese and is a remake of the German board game Funkenschlag. Each player represents a power supply company trying to connect as many cities as possible to its power grid. To do so, you will have to build power plants to supply enough electricity to power your cities; own enough resources to run the power plants; and earn enough funds to connect the cities and buy the power plants and resources.Each game of Power Grid is played on a board featuring a map of a region hungry for power. The base game comes with 2 maps: the USA and Germany. Each map shows the cities that can be connected to your power grid and the connection fees between the cities. For example, it is cheaper to connect Washington with nearby Philadelphia than it is to connect San Francisco to Seattle. The board also contains a grid showing the raw materials (coal, oil, garbage and uranium), how much is available and how much they cost.There are 4 actions each round in your quest to power the most cities (the game ends when a player connects a certain number of cities, determined by the number of players). Firstly, players take turns to bid for power plants. These plants can be powered by materials such as oil, coal, garbage, uranium and wind. Each power plant also has different efficiencies (being able to power a different number of cities), but you pay for that efficiency by spending more to buy the more efficient power plants.There is an order to the bidding process. The player with the most connected cities each round get to bid for power plants first. However, this is balanced by the fact that they will be the last to buy raw materials and connect cities. Buying raw materials involves grabbing coal, oil, garbage or uranium from the board at their current price. There is a raw materials market that changes depending on supply and demand. The materials replenish at a fixed rate each turn, and are consumed by players using the related power plants. The more of each material is available, the cheaper it is.Connecting cities involves paying connection fees and placing your tokens on the connected cities. There are clusters of cities on each board where the connection fees are pretty cheap, but building in those areas means competing against more players who also want to take advantage of the cheap connections. Power Grid also divides the game into 3 phases: starting, growing and matured phases. Progressing from one phase to the next changes the amount of raw materials that are replenished each round, and also increases the number of players who can connect to each city.The last action in the round is to power your cities. You use up the required raw materials and earn cash depending on how many cities you powered. You can then use this cash to buy more power plants and resources, and connect more cities the next round.Power Grid is mainly about efficiency and strategic planning. The goal is to power as many cities as you can, and the player who is the most efficient and can do it the fastest will win. Also, how much are you willing to bid for that attractive power plant? Should you spend your limited funds connecting choice cities first or overbidding for that new power plant? Is it worth it to spend a bit more to connect to distant cities in order to cut other players off from a city network? Should you target cities in cheap but congested networks or go for the isolated expensive ones? These are questions you need to always keep in mind, and the answers will change depending on how your opponents play as well.The game also has expansion boards and power plant sets. New boards include France, Central Europe, China and Korea, and each introduces interesting aspects to the game. For example, the order in which power plants are revealed in the China game reflect’s the country’s planned economy. Similarly, there are 2 resource markets in Korea to reflect the separate North and South economies, and the North Korea resource market doesn’t have uranium (right…).Overall, Power Grid isn’t too challenging a game to learn. The mechanics are pretty straightforward and easily grasped, though it might take time to master the efficiency and fund-allocation required to be really good at it. The game takes just over 2 hours, and is one of few games that can play up to 6 players without losing its appeal or taking too long.Complexity: 3.5/5.0Playing Time: 2.0 to 2.5 hoursNumber of Players: 2 to 6 players

Find Some Suitable Online Games for Kids

With the advance of internet, online games for kids also have advanced and come a long way. Many companies create and market a wide variety of games for kids such as gun games. It has grown as a big market and millions of people make a living out of it worldwide. Starting for preschool kids to teenagers, everyone loves these. However it has been noticed that sometimes even adults are fond of these online games.When you are selecting an online-game for your kids you should take care of some simple things. The one you are selecting should be easily understandable depending on age of your kid. The technology selected for the games makes them faster and easier to play. However, it is possible that the kids get addicted to them. So, you should plan out a routine and make them habituated to a balanced routine of daily necessary activities and the online games for kids.Using the games makes your kid understand the basic functions of the keys on the keyboards and use of the computer systems swiftly. While choosing the game you should also take into account that there is not much of violence involved in the online game.Excessive violence in games for kids is not at all advisable which can be seen in most of the motorcycle games. Before dispensing the game to your kid you can go through it manually and learn about it and decide how it might affect your kid’s psychology. An online-game world is a virtual world and your kid must be able to differentiate between virtual and the real world activities and correlate them.Sometimes the online sites list the games for kids and adults together and there is no restriction for kids to access them. However, you can check it time to time what your kid is accessing when he is playing an online game. Putting good network administration software can help you to block any adult content which might affect your kid.

Can Fun Online Games Be Healthy?

Did you know that not only kids and teens play fun online games? A lot of us play games in the internet just for fun and to relax or have a break from our busy lives and our work. If kids do it for pure fun and exhilaration, we do it not only for pleasure but also to bring things back into perspective.Facing daily stress is not good for our health. Whether it is a good laugh or playing fun online games, we need something that can break the chains of stress, which will deteriorate our health fast.Almost 50% of all health related issues are directly results of daily stress and it is not just a matter of consequence. Given this fact, we all are encouraged to find something that can perk our days up and relieve the pressure.It would be great to find a website that offers internet-based games, flash games or web-based games that you can play alone or with other people with the same goal as you, which is to have some fun. It would be even better if the site you have come across have a large collection of free online games that you can choose from so that you can enjoy the diversity.If you are looking for some free fun then Fun Online Games would be a great option. If you are just a casual gamer who just wanted to take a break from the hustles of your daily routine, playing these games would definitely change your mood in no time. In fact, more than 200 million people are now hooked on playing online web-based games.If you are not that computer savvy and you just wanted to play for fun, these online games are user-friendly, which will not require you to have any background of flash games at all. Even your kids can play along with you as well.Laying back and relaxing does not necessarily mean you should take a nap or do nothing for the entire duration. Sometimes having a few good laughs with online games and having fun playing are a good way to start brightening your mood.